Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts thinks the people who voted for moral reasons against same-sex marriage did so because of those freaks in San Francisco, not the ones in Massachusetts:
Mr. Frank was opposed to the San Francisco weddings from the start and told (San Francisco Mayor Gavin) Newsom as much before the ceremonies began. He urged the mayor to follow the Massachusetts path, which involved winning approval for the marriages in court before issuing licenses.
In a telephone interview on Thursday, Mr. Frank said he felt vindicated by the election results. In Massachusetts, every state legislator on the ballot who supported gay rights won another term. By contrast, constitutional amendments against gay marriage won handily in 11 states – including Ohio, an important battleground – in large part, Mr. Frank said, because of the “spectacle weddings” in San Francisco.
Mr. Frank said Mr. Newsom had helped to galvanize Mr. Bush’s conservative supporters in those states by playing into people’s fears of same-sex weddings.
Had the Massachusetts approach been followed, he said, “I think there would have been some collateral damage” in the election, but “a lot less.”
“The thing that agitated people were the mass weddings,” he said, adding, “It was a mistake in San Francisco compounded by people in Oregon, New Mexico and New York. What it did was provoke a lot of fears.”
“He created a sense there was chaos,” Mr. Frank said of Mr. Newsom, “rather than give us a chance to show, as we have in Massachusetts, that this doesn’t mean anything to anyone else.”
From my observations, I have seen and heard many more people cite the Mass. Supreme Court decision as the biggest threat to traditional marriage, not the spectacle weddings.
